Back to the Future: The Central Vineyards, 2026. The 2024 Vintage
In this instalment of my 2026 focus on the Central Vineyards I present the first of three collections of tasting notes on the wines of this region to be published this year. In this report I focus on the 2024 vintage.
For tasting notes on the 2025 vintage, by the way, check out my Loire 2025: First Taste report.
To read my introduction to this report, which pays particular attention to how the region has grown, and to the changes I have witnessed here during the course of the last three decades, see Back to the Future: The Central Vineyards. Subsequent reports, to follow this one, will move the spotlight from 2024 onto preceding vintages, with a large number of wines from the 2023 vintage, before I conclude with wines from 2022 and older vintages. That includes a number of wines from 2021 and 2020, but stretches back as far as 2015.
The 2024 Vintage
Everywhere you look across the Central Vineyards, from Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé to Menetou-Salon, Quincy, Reuilly, Coteaux du Giennois and Châteaumeillant, 2024 was a year defined by rain. From mid-October 2023 to mid-October 2024, the region received almost twice the rainfall of an average year, with the deluge beginning during an unusually mild winter and continuing through much of the growing season. It was, according to the Service Interprofessionnel de Conseil Agronomique de Vinification et d’Analyses du Centre (SICAVAC), one of the most challenging vintages in recent decades.
February and March were mild, with temperatures around 1.5°C above average, and the exceptional warmth of mid-March brought the earliest Pinot Noir budbreak recorded in sixty years, on March 22nd. The Sauvignon Blanc followed in early April, but this early advantage was rapidly lost as the weather then turned cool and wet. There was even a frost, with the greatest threat between April 21st and 24th, and some vineyards took serious damage. This was especially true in Châteaumeillant where, for all intents and purposes, the entire crop was lost, with less dramatic losses recorded in parts of Pouilly-Fumé and Coteaux du Giennois.
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